Eric Wendelin's Blog

A couple months ago I was at my Alma Mater Adams State College to talk about what I would have wanted to know if I was a student. I’ve been out of college for 3 years now, and held 3 VERY different programming jobs since graduating with my Bachelor’s Degree. I am hoping to shed some light on what I have learned about the "real world" and clear up some misconceptions.

Quick background

I just want to give you enough information about where I’m coming from here. Obviously, your experiences will be different but I think there are several things common to almost all workplaces and that is what this post will focus on.

I have done data-oriented programming, back-end programming, and web programming for a couple small companies and one quite large company. All of these positions were around Northern Colorado/Wyoming so we’re not exactly in Silicon Valley. If you really care about the details you can check out my LinkedIn page.

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I’m in San Francisco where JavaOne is now halfway complete. This is my first time at the largest programming conference, and I have learned what JavaOne is really about and the best ways to take full advantage of the opportunity:

Talk to every person that is directly behind you in the queues

JavaOne is NOT just about learning, it is about networking. I challenge you to do this and I know that you will be well rewarded for it. You might even find out about good parties, more on that later. Making good connections will take your career a long way, and if you are hiring than you are bound to find people that suit just what you are looking for.

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You have probably seen a lot of buzz surrounding software engineering jobs that offer amazing benefits just to attract and keep "rock star" talent. The first ones that come to mind for me are from Hedgehog Labs and perhaps What else do companies have to do to keep Software Engineers?. You probably know (dream?) about Google 20% time. I was just talking with a friend about how great his benefits were over mine yadda yadda yadda… It has become a big bragging point in our industry.

What I’m wondering

The thing I’m wondering here is: How far does it go? I am trying to consider in what other jobs benefits like work-from-home programs, free conferences, multiple monitors, and flex time are almost standard. I know that we don’t all have these nice things but doesn’t it seem like this profession goes further than most? I know that I’m already at the point where I would have a really hard time adjusting to a job without these benefits. Are you?

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1. Don’t create prototypes

Clients do not know what they want. Managers do not know what they want. When you prototype, you learn about the constraints you are going to face and your audience learns what they can have and what is impossible. NOTE: Try not to use your prototypes for production code, they are meant to be prototypes. Learn from them and don’t just….

2. Copy the code

When you copy code one of these scenarios is likely to occur: either you don’t fully understand what it does or you may know but don’t think about refactoring it to be better because you expect it to just work. I know many of you out there see this all day long: someone copies code because they are lazy and don’t correctly create an abstraction, and they end up violating the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. Now when rules change, you have multiple pieces of code to change. Unfortunately, it seems that people who copy code also tend to believe that they should…

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